MONTREAL - Only a few women in Canada are tough enough – or crazy enough – to play wheelchair rugby.

Alison Levine is one of them.

The 21-year-old from Côte St. Luc is one of 4,000 athletes competing in the 29th annual Défi Sportif event, which starts Monday at Centre Claude Robillard and five other sites around the greater Montreal area.

The Canadian wheelchair rugby championships start Friday and run through the weekend at Centre Pierre-Charbonneau.

Originally called “murderball” by the athletes who invented it in Winnipeg in the mid 1970s, and referred to as “quad rugby” in the U.S., its resemblance to stand-up rugby is really in name only. For one thing, a slightly lighter version of a standard volleyball and not a rugby ball is used.

It’s a sport for significantly disabled athletes now played in 24 countries. Many of them found themselves unable to keep up with the ball-handling skills wheelchair basketball requires. Most are classified as quadriplegic and must have significant impairment to both the upper and lower limbs.

But the name evokes the full-contact nature of wheelchair vs. wheelchair, the tantalizing possibility of having an opponent face-plant on the parquet after a particularly tough hit – or, face-planting yourself.

“People often view people in wheelchairs as kind of fragile. Just getting into my car, or going to the grocery store, I see it,” said Levine, who has a neuromuscular disorder of unknown origin that has progressively robbed her of her mobility.

“And then you play, and you’re able to cream someone and knock them out of their chairs. It’s like you forget; it’s like a level playing field,” she added. “When I go to practice after a bad day, ooohhh, watch out!”

Levine has squared off against national-team players like 41-year-old Garrett Hickling, who has good trunk control, is a big man, and also has silver and bronze medals from the last two Paralympic Games.

“We all try to throw our bodies into it. But he has good abdominal muscles. So when he hits, sometimes you kind of lose your breath a little,” she said. “But afterwards, you’re: ‘Oh, that’s good. That’s good.”

Levine, who studies special care counselling at Vanier College, began noticing symptoms when she was about 12.

Before that, she was an outdoor kid.

“I didn’t find one thing I was really good at, but I played on a city softball team, soccer, played some basketball at school. I was always outside, riding my bike,” she said. “When I started having problems, I searched desperately for a sport to play, because that’s what gets me through my day – getting out there, hitting people, taking out your frustrations, just being active.”

Levine has only been in a wheelchair full-time for about a year. She started with sledge hockey and wheelchair basketball. When she stared playing rugby, she could still walk with the help of crutches and braces.

“When I lost hand ability, basketball became very, very difficult. I couldn’t shoot the ball to the basket, and everyone was doing circles around me,” she said. “So once the hands went, it was rugby time.”

Levine had been with the Montreal team for only three weeks when she was asked to join Team Quebec; her wheelchair basketball background gave her a big head start. She competed in the Défi Sportif once before, in that discipline.

This year, though, the Quebec team moved its training camps to Quebec City. As a full-time student, the logistics were too daunting.

So Levine has had to content herself with local tournaments for now. With the relative lack of teams in the area, participants (which often include players from Ottawa and New Hampshire) are put into one pool then allocated by their classification (which ranges from 0.5 to the most functional, 3.5) to various squads.

Levine is classified as a 1.5. But because she’s a woman, there’s an 0.5 discount on that, which puts her at 1.0.

“Physically, women have less strength in the shoulders. It’s a little weird, but if you matched me against a another 1.5 guy, who was also trying to make the national team, he’s going to be better,” she said. “Plus, they’re bigger.”

In the Canadian championships, Levine will compete for Team Quebec B. Their first match will be Friday at 11 a.m.

“The game is a lot more strategic, and that’s also what I love about it,” Levine said. “Everyone’s more severely disabled than in wheelchair basketball, so you have to take into account people’s abilities more when you decide to make a pass or a play.”

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